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The housing crisis has a personal hook for Sen. John Keenan, whose son and nephew both left Massachusetts and settled in at an affordable Nashville apartment with parking, a pool and gym access.

Sen. Cynthia Creem is frustrated that some cities and towns are not shouldering the same burden of zoning changes as those in her district.

And a conflicted Democrat Sen. Paul Feeney gave consideration to supporting a Republican amendment to push back deadlines under the MBTA Communities Act, saying he’s worried one Town Meeting vote could cause the state to slash state aid.

If the late-night outpouring of emotion about a single budget amendment is any indication, Beacon Hill could be in for a doozy of a debate whenever top Democrats get around to a major housing bill this summer.

Push to Delay Zoning Deadlines Was Spark

“I know a lot of you know that my number-one reason for being in this chamber right now is health care,” Sen. Cindy Friedman, a top deputy in charge of complex health care legislation, told her colleagues Thursday night near the end of three days of Senate budget sessions. “I will tell you that there’s nothing more important than health care — except for housing.”

Elected officials have long dubbed the lack of available, affordable housing a crisis, and the fraught warnings have increased in recent months as prices continue to soar and Bay Staters — especially young adults — consider departing for lower-cost locales.

Legislative leaders have not rolled out a housing policy response this term, apart from some tax credits and budget funding designed to boost production. But the reaction in the Senate to an MBTA Communities Act-related budget amendment late last week showed the pressure some lawmakers are feeling and punctuated how divisive housing production can be as an issue.

The amendment would have given cities and towns an extra year to comply with the MBTA Communities Act, a 2021 law that passed without much fanfare at the time and has become one of the tensest topics in state government since then.

While many communities made the zoning changes necessary to comply with the law, several are fighting against the state-mandated push to make multifamily housing development easier, uncovering new and old wounds about who should bear the burden of housing more people and how far the state should go to impose its will on cities and towns.

Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr, who filed the amendment, said the law has led to an “adversarial relationship” between the state and municipalities. He pitched the one-year delay as a “safety valve to allow us to rebuild the relationship.”

“It should be our obligation to have a partnership with our cities and towns, to work with them to ensure that the pronouncements that we make from this building are ones which we work with them to bring to fruition,” Tarr, a Gloucester Republican, said from the Senate floor. “Allowing them an additional year with that principle in mind is not unreasonable. In fact, it could be helpful in terms of having districts that are drawn with more of an opportunity to actually have housing built than drawn hastily in ways that are somewhat of a check-the-box exercise.”

Legislators Detail Housing Cost Woes

Senators wound up rejecting Tarr’s proposal with an unrecorded voice vote, but spent more than an hour detailing the strain created by housing costs and the struggles that municipal officials face balancing the need for growth with a desire to maintain community character.

Keenan, a Quincy Democrat, said his son “did a little homework” during the COVID-19 pandemic and decided to move to Nashville. He found a fully furnished apartment in a three-year-old building, which includes parking, a pool deck, a gym and shared workspace, all for less than $1,700 per month, according to Keenan.

“It’s so nice that my nephew, raised in Billerica who lived in Somerville, did the math and said, ‘Nashville, here I come,'” Keenan said.

What happens, Keenan asked, if more low- and middle-income workers make the same decision that his son and nephew did?

“When you dial 911, who comes to your house? When you go to a restaurant, who provides the food? When you turn on the faucet, who makes sure that the water that comes out is clean? When you flush your toilet, who makes sure that it goes to the pipes and out to a system that works? Who plows your street in the winter? Who works in your library? Who does all of those things that we depend on having done?” he said. “Unless they’re really wealthy, who’s going to do it if they can’t afford to live here?”

“A one-year delay makes it even less affordable for people to live here,” Keenan added. “One year becomes two years becomes three years, and we continue to see the outflow of population, and the gap between the haves and the have-nots continues to grow.”

Some Sympathy for Rezoning Opponents

For Feeney – who recalled growing up closer to Boston and relocating south for a more affordable home – the decision might have been more difficult. The Foxborough Democrat said he “may support” Tarr’s amendment, even though he never got a chance to record his formal stance because the minority leader did not pursue a roll call vote.

The MBTA Communities Act is the “right policy,” Feeney said, but a one-year deadline delay “shows some respect to those towns that are struggling,” especially in Town Meeting municipalities where a large number of individual voters wield direct power over decisions.

“I think about one community in my district that just had a Town Meeting and this didn’t pass,” Feeney said. “By God, we only have one more shot at this potentially in a fall special Town Meeting. What else is going to be on that fall special Town Meeting? Will this pass? Will this fail? Will people not know what it is? And then within weeks of that Town Meeting, it’s the deadline, and then you have a community that’s going to be faced with losing potential state aid and grants and money, a community that could be facing a potential lawsuit.”

The law set out two major deadlines. A dozen communities close to the core MBTA subways, trolleys and Silver Line buses had until the end of 2023 to submit plans allowing multifamily housing by right in at least one reasonably sized district. More than 150 others with proximity to commuter rail, ferries or bus lines have until Dec. 31, 2024 to do the same.

Milton is the only so-called rapid transit community that did not fall into line by the Dec. 31, 2023 deadline. The Healey administration revoked its eligibility for a $140,800 seawall grant, and Attorney General Andrea Campbell sued the town in a case expected to go before the Supreme Judicial Court in October.

Creem represents Newton and Brookline, which had to comply by the first deadline, as well as Wellesley, which has until the end of this year. She described an arduous process featuring “a lot of angst” to get the new zoning plans approved.

“Some of them had an election and threw incumbents out and couldn’t get it done, but they finally – the time was there, they worked it out, they got together, it wasn’t perfect, but they did it,” she said. “And why should they have done it if I’m going to vote [that] someone else doesn’t have to for a year?”

“We’re in this together. Everybody should be treated the same,” Creem added. “Somebody did it, others did it, and others are just going to have to bite the bullet.”

The next housing debate in the state legislature is likely to take far broader an aim than the Senate’s revisited MBTA Communities talk. Top Democrats at some point plan to bring forward Healey’s policy-heavy, $4.1 billion housing bond bill, which has been idling at the committee level for more than seven months.